I know I have a handful of dedicated readers out there *waves* and I spose’ now is as good time as many to do the thing that for some reason most bloggers dread.
Disclosures.
You see, after nearly three years of blogging at random places (LostTheTech, TechGeist, TheNextWeb, Technorati… whatever), having an assortment of grammar fails, being horrifically wrong on numerous occasions, and getting tore a new one by random commenters on Digg/Reddit/Slashdot/FriendFeed/Twitter or any other social media service you can possibly imagine, it is all finally starting to pay off.
Last week, Sean O’Gwin called me and offered me a freelance job to write about each of the speakers at the Kynetx Impact Conference, specifically what my personal thoughts were on each of them.
Woah.
I have never actually been straight up paid to write blog posts before. Sure, I have earned some advertising money here or there, but to be honest, the money I earn from Cliqset doesn’t even begin to cover hosting, and let’s not bring up Adsense.
Needless to say, I took the job. Which means I now have an official conflict of interest!
My first post will go out today, and I will be cross-posting the post I wrote for the Kynetx blog to mine with links and probably a little graphic pimping Kynetx as well. There will also be the appropriate disclosure at the beginning and end of the post making it very clear I did get paid to write it. Every word written in that post, and future posts, will be 100% what I think about Kynetx and whatever other parties I mentioned. I have been blogging basically unpaid for a few years now, if I didn’t believe in Kynetx, I wouldn’t of taken the job. While the money is nice (the good lord knows I can do with it), I am not willing to compromise the hopeful trust ,and credibility, I have with you readers. I would gladly deny that paycheck if I had to, and I hope you know that…
Y’all are worth more to me.
So in short, yup, I am getting paid, and in essence, I truly believe it shouldn’t affect you at all.
BUT
If you feel it is, you know where to get a hold of me, private or public, it doesn’t matter.
Until then, I really do hope you enjoy 
Note: There is a slight possibility that this job with Kynetx could turn into a more permanent position. If it does, I will write a whole new post addressing that issue. Until then, I am not concerned about it, and neither should y’all.
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Bringing the Defaults to The User #Kynetx
Disclosure: This post is a paid post originally published on Kynetx’s company blog. If you want to learn more, read this post here.
Brought to you by Kynetx: This Changes Everything!
At the Kynetx Impact Conference, respected technology blogger and Microsoft employee, Jon Udell, spoke about the history, current, and hopeful future of the contextual web.
If there was one thing that truly struck me hard about Udell’s speech at Impact, it was the bit about user defaults. Here’s a quote from him that really sums up the topic of defaults quite well:
“People will say that they want to have things their way. They will make it sound like they care a lot about about personalization, but, watch what people do, and they will almost always take the defaults”.
What is great about this statement is how true it really is.
Need proof?
Let’s look at my prom coming up this weekend. We are going to the amusement park at Mall of America and the dance will be held at Underwater World in MOA as well.
Great, right?
Not so much.
Due to liability and other legal issues, if we are going to prom (which I am), we cannot leave the amusement park, which means we will not get home until five in the morning.
Needless to say, most students were not particularly thrilled about this.
But wait! The school did give us the chance to “personalize” our prom. In a letter sent out to all students, the school laid out their budget with a list of restrictions and basically said if we can think of something better within these parameters, we’ll adjust our plans.
Not one student, including myself, went about doing this. Instead, we threw the letters away, and continued to moan and groan about the situation. Why is this? After all, the school gave us all the necessary tools to basically “customize” our prom. We really had no excuse not to take advantage of these tools and options provided to us.
It is because we as a human race are inherently lazy, and that’s not going to change when a browser is opened.
I would almost go as far to say that if it was up to the students to make our prom happen at all, and we had the necessary tools, there would still be no prom.
The school basically had to “opt-in” the student body in order to get the ball rolling. Turns out what they were opting us into wasn’t all that popular with the student body, but was still accepted.
Sound familiar to *cough*, Facebook anyone?
So how do we solve this situation? As Udell rightly pointed out, it is quite a difficult balance to maintain, and no one has a true solution. But there is one company that I truly believe is headed in the right direction, and this company (surprise!) is Kynetx. They are solving this dilemma by enabling developers to bring the defaults to the user.
What do I mean by this?
A quick look back at my prom story should clarify.
If the school would’ve given us a list of defaults, or what students would’ve perceived as options, we would’ve chosen out of all the defaults the one that would’ve suited us best as a student body.
Kynetx is doing the same thing.
Developers are the school of the Kynetx platform, providing applications, or defaults, for users to choose from. Users of these apps are the students of the school, choosing the best application, or default, to create a more personalized/contextual web.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? The answer has been staring us right in the face this whole time.
With some fine tuning and the integral help of the Kynetx platform, bringing defaults to the user could strike this balance that Facebook, and many other companies, are seemingly struggling to find. I for one believe that this is the simple and efficient balance many people are begging for, do you agree?
Disclosure: This post is a paid post originally published on Kynetx’s company blog. If you want to learn more, read this post here.